The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Joel and Ethan Coen's The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018) is an oddity among American films, an anthology picture comprised of six separate and, indeed, very different tales, all of them set in the American West.  The film is extremely entertaining -- the stories are all interesting, narratively concise, both well-acted and well-performed.  It is a tribute to the overall excellence of the project that every review of the film that I have read names a different segment or story in the anthology as the best in the group.  It seems, accordingly, that there is literally something for everyone in this picture and that different viewers will judge the stories, apparently, according to their own distinct esthetics and interests.  The movie begins with the shot of an old, dog-eared book, a Victorian-era anthology of short stories set in the American West.  A hand turns the page to a color illustration, an engraving that is protected behind a film of onion paper -- the illustrations, generally, show bizarre scenes that seem highly incongruous with a fragment of dialogue or narration in italics at the foot of the picture.  We wonder how this strange image can possibly be relevant to a story set in the American West.  The story follows, always ending with a shot of the last page of the tale, sometimes supplying useful additional information (if you can read quickly enough) and sometimes merely depicting something that we have already seen.  The hand, then, turns the page to the next illustration and, then, the next of the six stories begins.  The movie is unified by its splendid photography and the weird argot spoken by the characters -- everyone talks as if the characters were in Charles Portis' famous novel True Grit:  the speeches are elaborate, florid, and feature exotic words and circumlocutions that are sometimes hard to understand.  (The last tale involves bounty hunters, although I didn't understand that "harvesting" meant killing people for the rewards on their head.  In one tale, a young girl uses the word "apothegm".)  Everyone is wildly loquacious and people express themselves with baroque turns of phrase and elegant courtly, almost medieval, honorifics.  The fantastical quality of the diction and speeches, all of them remarkably gracious and, even, self-abasing -- people seem polite to a fault -- contrasts markedly with the extreme and bloody violence shown in about half of the tales:  people sing little arias to their counterparts showing the most exquisite etiquette before shooting or clubbing them to death or engaging in lynchings, murder, and other mayhem.

The film that The Ballad of Buster Scruggs most resembles is Kurosawa's Dreams .  There is an exotic, off-kilter and, even, surreal aspect to all of the stories.  Although the film features spectacular location-sequences and flawless historical recreations of such things as Indian attacks and wagon trains, the viewer senses something theatrical and dream-like in the narratives -- ordinary logic doesn't apply and there is a weird, almost Elizabethan formality about the way that people speak and the fates that they befall.  Many Coen brothers films are very, very dark and their jaunty aura of insouciance conceals a profound melancholy -- a strain of fatalistic despair underlies films like Inside Llewellyn Davis and the autobiographical A Serious Man.  People are wicked, selfish, and cruel -- the good are snuffed-out but this is fate is general:  no one gets out alive or unscathed.  Everyone is subject to a common, absurd or, even,  comically ridiculous doom.  As The Ballad progresses, the stories get more and more serious -- there are fewer jokes and allusions:  in the end of the film proceeds in deadly earnest.  But the subject matter keeps the audience entertained:  The Ballad of Buster Scruggs delivers all of the pleasures of the classic Western -- there are horse chases, battles with savage Indians, shoot-outs on Main Street at high noon, singing cowboys, stagecoach rides across barren terrain, and, of course, spectacular landscapes and nature photography.  But these elements act in service to a gloomy, nihilistic vision of the Old West as a place filled with random sudden death, wild Indians, and vicious brigands.

These themes are dramatized most efficiently in the opening tale, the eponymous Ballad of Buster Scruggs.  Scruggs is a singing cowboy, first presented two us crossing the enormous iconic desert at Monument Valley.  He's also a psychopathic killer who guns down anyone who crosses his path.  In a bar fight, he contrives a way to have a bad hombre shoot himself three times in the face -- then, he improvises a merry little ballad about a bad guy who had his face shot-off.  The saloon girls and gamblers all do a little jig to the tune.  But, of course, the fastest gun in the West is catnip to other killers and, sooner as opposed to later, someone rides into town who is even faster on the draw.  Scruggs is gunned down and, in a remarkable sequence, his soul, wearing little white wings soars up over the wilderness and the tiny Western village.  Scruggs is equipped with lyre and he sings and plays as he rises to heaven.  (This sequence seems a counterpoint to the last episode in the narrative that seems to be set in Sartre's version of Hell -- "other people" bickering and trapped on a spectral stagecoach that seems bound for perdition.)   "Near Algodones" involves a hapless bank robber played by James Franco -- he robs a little false-front bank set up in the absolute middle of nowhere, encounters a wild-eyed and indefatigably obstinate teller and, ultimately ends up getting lynched not once but twice. He sees a pretty girl smiling up at him from beneath the scaffold, comments "pretty girl" and, then, the screen goes black because the hood has been tugged over his eyes and the trap dropped much to the amusement of the crowd gathered for the hanging.  "The Meal Ticket" is ineffably weird -- the story of a scowling showman who drags a man without arms or legs through the snowy
Rocky Mountains.  The young man recites poetry -- he is called "the Wingless Thrush."  This section is so palpably cold and icy and you feel the sleet and frost coming off your TV set.  The story of the "Wingless Thrush" features a fantastic performance by the human oddity -- he pouts like a girl and has the features of Pre-Raphaelite maiden.  But interest in his recitations from Shakespeare and Byron palls and, in the end, his keeper (Liam Neeson) blithely replaces him with another sideshow act that is easier to keep and maintain.  In "All Gold Canyon" (derived from a Jack London story), an old prospector wanders into an incredibly lush and beautiful mountain valley.  He finds some nuggets of gold, digs dozens of pits in a verdant meadow, and, finally, discovers a rich vein of ore.  (He calls the vein of ore "Mr. Pocket.")   But a claim jumper ambushes him, guns the old man down in his pit, and, then, tries to seize the gold.  The old man revives, kills the claim-jumper, and departs from the valley lugging his sack of gold -- a stag returns to drink from the beautiful mountain stream and butterflies play among the flowers and a big owl views the whole episode with baleful eye.  "The Gal who got rattled" is also based on a short story written during the time of Teddy Roosevelt.  The tale involves a young woman who sets off with wagon train headed for the Willamette Valley in Oregon.  Her brother, who has induced her to leave the East, dies suddenly from cholera, but the girl continues West and her fortunes, it seems, improve markedly when the trail boss proposes marriage to her.  But she wanders away from the wagon train to chase her dog, a terrier called "President Pierce" and ends up in the middle of an Indian attack.  The fight with the Comanches in this section is one of the greatest "last stand" type battles ever filmed and the episode is a classic -- it is both genuinely terrifying and shocking as well.  The final sequence, called "The Mortal Remains" involves people on a hell-bound stage bickering about virtue and sin, all in the setting of imminent and ghastly death.  The film has a great soundtrack, many fine Western ballads and tunes, including everyone's all-time favor "Cool Water."  The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, now available on Netflix, is one of the best films of the year and highly recommended.